Thursday, July 31, 2008

This is only a portion from a larger clip available at archive.orgCurrently there is a Leonard Sandler fellowship at Columbia University

Leonard H. Sandler Fellowship - Established in memory of Judge Leonard H. Sandler, a 1950 Columbia Law graduate with a lifelong commitment to civil rights and liberties, this fellowship is open to J.D. graduates of Columbia Law School only.

A very close friend of Ed Koch's. Special kudos to the Judge for presiding over the disbarment of Roy Cohn

Leonard H. Sandler Is Dead at 62; New York Appellate Court Justice, October 25, 1988: Justice Leonard H. Sandler of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, who administered the oath of office to Mayor Koch for each of his three terms, died Sunday at St. Vincent's Hospital. He was 62 years old and lived in Manhattan.Justice Leonard H. Sandler of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, who administered the oath of office to Mayor Koch for each of his three terms, died Sunday at St. Vincent's Hospital. He was 62 years old and lived in Manhattan.Justice Sandler, who was elevated to the State Supreme Court in 1975, considered his most important opinion to have been in a 1971 case while he was a Civil Court judge. He ruled that a tenant could not be evicted for refusing to pay rent if the landlord did not provide basic services.Justice Sandler presided over a five-judge panel that ordered the disbarment of the lawyer Roy Cohn in 1986. The panel called Mr. Cohn's conduct in four legal matters ''unethical,'' ''unprofessional'' and, in one case, ''particularly reprehensible.''The panel that Justice Sandler led heard evidence that Mr. Cohn had failed to repay a loan from a client until disbarment proceedings began and had misappropriated and misused escrowed property of a client. Painstaking Legal AnalystEarly in his career, when he was a young assistant district attorney prosecuting homicide cases in Manhattan in the late 1950's, his colleagues called him ''the conscience of the homicide bureau.''''He was the best law man among us,'' one former colleague recalled in 1976, soon after Justice Sandler joined the State Supreme Court. ''Whenever there was a question of what to charge a defendant with, we would turn to him for a careful, painstaking legal analysis.''As a judge, he displayed crisp writing in his opinions, stripped for the most part of legal jargon. Known among his fellow judges as a scholar of the law, he contributed to this image by wearing tweed jackets and, in his early years on the bench, puffing on a pipe. He later switched to cigars, which he smoked in his chambers and in his law secretary's car, but never at home.In 1976, Justice Sandler was named to preside over the special grand juries that heard evidence gathered by Maurice H. Nadjari, a special state prosecutor who investigated political corruption.Mr. Nadjari was subsequently removed after obtaining indictments based on what legal authorities considered to be weak evidence. In one proceeding, Justice Sandler found that Mr. Nadjari had a ''sparse'' case against Patrick J. Cunningham, who was the Bronx Democratic county chairman at the time. Mr. Nadjari had accused Mr. Cunningham of being ''at the center of the corrupt marketplace of judgeships in the Bronx.'' A Diversity of CasesOther cases Justice Sandler decided during his years on the court involved plaintiffs and defendants as diverse as the police, bicycle messengers and preservationists opposing the dismantling of the Biltmore Hotel.In 1985, he wrote the majority opinion in a 3-to-1 decision ordering the reinstatement of a city police officer who had been dismissed two years earlier for posing nude for magazine photos. She was a civilian employee of the Police Department at the time the photos were taken.In his opinion, Justice Sandler held that Robert J. McGuire, who was the Police Commissioner at the time, lacked the jurisdiction to discipline the officer, Cibella R. Borges, for actions that occurred before her appointment as an officer.The justice rejected the Police Department's position that although she had not been a sworn officer when she posed for the photos, her employment as a civilian aide placed her in a ''special circumstance'' that subjected her to disciplinary proceedings and dismissal for misconduct.Justice Sandler said the city's administrative code ''can scarcely be clearer in conveying its intent that the disciplinary authority conferred extends to behavior occurring while a person is 'a member of the force.' '' Last year, he halted an experimental ban on bicyclists in midtown Manhattan for a week. He said the city could not issue summonses to bicyclists until after the trial judge in the case, Acting Justice Edward H. Lehner, had ruled on a suit brought by cyclists and messenger service companies.No decision on the right of patients suing psychotherapists for malpracticeThe Biltmore case went before him in 1981. With wreckers poised outside the hotel, on 43d Street at Madison Avenue, Justice Sandler granted an order delaying demolition until opponents could appear at a hearing and explain why they thought portions of the hotel were worthy of landmark status.Born Oct. 16, 1926, in the Bronx, he moved with his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan when he was 8 years old, and graduated from Seward Park High School when he was 15. Columbia Law Review EditorHe attended City College, from which he graduated cum laude in 1946, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After service in the Air Force, he enrolled at Columbia Law School, where he became editor of the law review.For the next two years, he was an associate with the law firm of Cleary, Berger, Gottlieb, Friendly & Hamilton, which he left in 1954 to begin seven years as an assistant district attorney under the Manhattan District Attorney, Frank S. Hogan.From 1963 to 1970, he was a partner in the firm of Kasanof & Sandler, specializing in criminal litigation.He was appointed to an interim term on the Civil Court in 1970 and was elected to a 10-year term in November of that year. He was designated an acting State Supreme Court justice for a three-month period in 1972 and held several other temporary appointments before Gov. Hugh L. Carey announced that he would name him to the State Supreme Court bench. However, the appointment never took place and he was elected instead.Justice Sandler had been active in liberal Democratic politics until he became a judge and had been a member of civil-liberties groups.He is survived by his wife, Alice; his mother, Hilda, of San Francisco; a brother, Herbert, of Oakland, Calif.; a nephew and a niece.

Using Google maps and their "street view" tool I matched up the picture of Tony on the "Perfectly Frank" album cover with an internet source that gave his address as 23-18 32nd Street (as shown in the lower picture). One problem is that Google maps are often inaccurate in their street view photos

I took a trip on a train and I thought about you.I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you.Two or three cars parked under the stars a winding stream.Moon shining down on some little townAnd with each beam the same old dream.And every stop that we made I thought about you.And when I pulled down the shade then I really felt blue.I peaked through the crack and looked at the track,The one going back to you and what did I do?I thought about you.There were two or three cars parked under the stars...a windin' stream.Moon shining down on some little townAnd with each beam the same old dream.And then I peaked through the crack and I looked at that track,The one going back to you, and what did I do...I thought about you.

We thought about Nancy when we saw the "Fancy Nancy" book in the window. Astoria still has regular pharmacies, shoe stores, hardware stores and Italian bakeries. It has the old fashioned storefronts that have a cut out that sort of beckon you in. The pizza place recommended in the video, Polito's, was excellent.

Armed with video above and a quest to find Tony Bennett's childhood home the 14 Monroe team visited a neighborhood that had some of that old world charm that KVers love.from wikipedia

Astoria is a neighborhood in the northwestern corner of the borough of Queens in New York City. Located in Community Board 1, Astoria is bounded by the East River and is adjacent to three other Queens neighborhoods: Long Island City, Sunnyside (bordering at Northern Boulevard), and Woodside (bordering at 50th Street).Originally, Astoria was known as Hallet's Cove, but was renamed after John Jacob Astor, who never set foot in the neighborhood, in order to persuade him to invest $2,000 in the neighborhood. He only invested $500, but the name stayed. A bitter battle over naming the village was finally won by supporters and friends of Astor who had become the wealthiest man in America by 1840 with a net worth of over $40 million. Astor did live in a place called "Astoria" (his summer home), built in Manhattan on what is now East 87th Street near York Avenue, from which he could see across the river the new Long Island village named in his honor.Beginning in the early 19th century, affluent New Yorkers constructed large residences around 12th and 14th streets, an area that later became known as Astoria Village (now Old Astoria). Hallet's Cove, founded in 1839 by fur merchant Steven Halsey, was a noted recreational destination and resort for Manhattan's wealthy.During the second half of the 1800s, economic and commercial growth brought about increased immigration from German settlers, mostly furniture and cabinet makers. One such settler was Henry Steinway, patriarch of the Steinway family who founded the Steinway Piano Company in 1853. Afterwards, the Steinways built a sawmill and foundry, as well as a streetcar line. The family eventually established Steinway Village for their workers, a community that provided school instruction in German as well as English.In 1870, Astoria and several other surrounding villages, including Steinway, were incorporated into Long Island City. Long Island City remained an independent municipality until it was incorported into New York City in 1898. The area's farms were turned into housing tracts and street grids to accommodate the growing number of residents.Astoria was first settled by the Dutch and Germans in the 17th century.The 1960s saw a large number of ethnic Greeks from Greece, Albania and Cyprus, giving Astoria the largest Greek population out of any New York City neighborhood.The Greek cultural imprint can be seen in the numerous Greek restaurants, bakeries, tavernas and cafes, as well as several Greek Orthodox churches. With approximately 25,000-30,000 residents claiming Greek ethnicity, Astoria has one of the largest concentrations of Greeks outside Greece.Beginning in the mid-1970s, the neighborhood's Arab population grew from earlier Lebanese immigrants, to include people from Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco. In the 1990's, Steinway Street between 28th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard saw the establishment of many Arabic shops, restaurants and cafes.Astoria's Latino population has seen significant growth since the early 1990s, including a large population of Brazilians, who reside in the 36th avenue area. Albanians have also shown a rise in the numbers. South Asian immigrants predominantly from Bangladesh also constitute a sizable population in Astoria specially around 32nd Street and 34th Avenue.There is some debate as to what constitutes the geographic boundaries of Astoria. The neighborhood was part of Long Island City (LIC) prior to the latter's incorporation into the City of New York in 1898, and much of it is still classified as LIC by the USPS.The area south of Astoria was called Ravenswood, and traditionally, Broadway was the considered the border between the two. Today, however, many residents and businesses south of Broadway identify themselves as Astorians for convenience or status, since Long Island City has historically been considered an industrial area, and Ravenswood is now mostly a low-income neighborhood. Some of the thoroughfares have lent their names to unofficial terms for the areas they serve. For instance, the eastern end of Astoria, with Steinway Street as its main thoroughfare, is sometimes referred to simply as "Steinway", and the northern end around Ditmars Boulevard is called "Ditmars". Banners displayed on lamp posts along 30th Avenue refer to it as "the Heart of Astoria".Astoria is served by the R and V lines that run through the stop Steinway Street and 46 Street as well as the N and W subway lines – formerly called the BMT – which run along an elevated track above 31st Street. Subway stops are located at several east-west avenues, with the terminus at Ditmars Boulevard, which extends roughly eastward from Astoria Park to the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport. The next major avenue south of Ditmars with a subway stop is Astoria Boulevard, which flanks the Grand Central Parkway and the Triborough Bridge. Below that is the 30th Avenue stop, then Broadway.Farthest south is 36th Avenue or Dutch Kills, a low-density commercial area that features traditional Bengali restaurants and shops. The primary streets running north-south are Vernon Boulevard along the East River; 21st Street, a major traffic artery with a mix of residential, commercial and industrial areas; 31st Street; and Steinway Street (named for Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, founder of the Steinway & Sons piano factory[6]), a major commercial street with many retail stores, and a very prominent Middle Eastern section between Astoria Boulevard and 28th Avenue referred to as "Little Egypt". * Attractions in Astoria include the Kaufman Astoria Studios' Museum of the Moving Image, Isamu Noguchi Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Astoria Park, along the East River, is Astoria's largest park and also contains the largest of New York City's public pools which was also the former site of the U.S. Olympic trials. * The Hell Gate Bridge and New York Connecting Railroad viaduct rise high above Astoria. * The oldest beer garden in New York City, Bohemian Hall, was founded in 1910 when Astoria was largely Irish, Italian, Bohemian (Czech), and Slovak.The block of 37th Street between Ditmars Boulevard and 23rd Avenue is sometimes referred to as "the Seinfeld Street." In the Seinfeld television show, this street is occasionally seen in external establishing shots as the block where George Costanza's parents live.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Maybe Neal Hellman and Jane Babits know of him?btw sister Maggie appears in Kim Cattrall's movie, "Sexual Intelligence" as one of the experts. I think the KV Rambo may help Kim in some of the how tos

Accompanied by seven men and women and four sexology experts, presenter/host Kim Cattrall takes viewers around the world and back home in an exploration of the boundaries and aspirations of our own sexual identities. Our first stop is the bucolic town of Dorset, England, home of the mysterious "Abbas Giant," a huge figure carved into the chalky hillside centuries ago depicting a man with "the largest hard-on on earth" - a phallus some 12 feet long. Such overt expressions of sexuality were common in ancient cities like Rome and Pompey (we see phallic oil lamps and doorstops recovered from the ruins), and it is only recently (within the last few hundred years or so) that society began "covering up" or censoring these expressions. Nor was the concept of "bigger is better" necessarily in vogue for the ancients; as many statues and paintings attest, smaller penises were coveted by the ancients while large ones were usually attached to devilish characters and reprobates.Interestingly, in the dark ages when penises were banished from sight, the female genitalia was not. Indeed, there has always been something of a celebration of the vulva, in art and in nature; it occupies a unique and mysterious place in our sexual imagination, a kind of doorway that can be either inviting or frightening, with the potential to invite the phallus into a special place - or swallow it up and render it impotent. The vagina's beauty appears to be in the eye of the beholder; while one man says the vagina "looks awful, feels great," others feel it to be the paradigm of pulchritude, noting that contemporary artists like Georgia O'Keefe devoted a preponderance of their paint and palettes to vulvaesque subjects. Another "miracle" of nature is the clitoris; Cattrall asserts that the human species is the only one in which females achieve orgasm. Ultimately, pleasure arises not from the penis or clitoris, but from the brain, which processes the information it receives from the nerve endings below.Human sexual behavior has been chronicled since the dawn of history, starting with the "first lady of lust and libido," Aphrodite, who symbolically rose out of the water as a symbol of sexuality and fertility. Her image is in many ways the blueprint for desire, though we're each "hardwired" with a "love map" that arouses us when the right person arrives. While many of our desires stem from childhood experience and are more complex and hidden than we realize, there are certain quantifiable determinants that both stimulate our sex drive and, ultimately, make it fizzle out. The chemical component to attraction is Oxytocin, the hormone of love, and it's why most men experience the so-called "seven-year itch" (though more likely it's about five years). While infidelity is often the result, sexuality at its human zenith involves ethics: the ability not to exploit, but to allow freedom, both in the act of sex and in the choice of sex partners. Ethics also allow us to act out our fantasies without allowing them to become addictions, where they may cause harm to others or interfere with the rules of society. As Cattrall says, fantasy is the opposite of reality for most of us, because "we want to be safe." The mystical possibilities of sex flow from the act of surrender. The writer D.H. Lawrence was fascinated with how sexuality entwined with religion, how sex connects us all to something much bigger. In a way, the body is the doorway to the divine, both in physical imagery and spiritual ecstasy. The story of Aphrodite's son Cupid, who is the object of love for the human Psyche even though she is not allowed to look at him, illustrates how humans lust after the divine as if it were a sexual object.Ultimately, sex opens us up to our emotions, both physical and aesthetic. It is also the driving force in a human's most passionate search: for love and issues of the soul. As Cattrall concludes, "Sexual intelligence helps us explore the roots of our desires. It encourages us to embrace and celebrate the sensual dynamics in life, nature, culture and, most importantly, in ourselves."Kim Cattrall Sexual Intelligence was shot on location in Dorset, England (where the world's largest depiction of a phallus exists), Cyprus (near the ruins of Pompey, a civilization that celebrated sex in its art and its lifestyle), and the U.S.

Tom Paley (born 19th March 1928) is an American banjo-player.Tom Paley was born and raised in New York City, where he first fell in love with old-time music. He began playing guitar and 5-string banjo and quickly excelled at both instruments. He briefly performed in a duo with the great folk musician Woody Guthrie. Later, he helped form The New Lost City Ramblers, with Mike Seeger and John Cohen. This group inspired a greater mainstream interest in traditional old-time music, without altering the tradition of it. John Cohen once remarked that the Ramblers considered their live concerts primarily as opportunities to share great old songs they had discovered with their fellow folk performers. Paley's hot finger-picking guitar leads were amazing; the best example is probably his legendary arrangement of "Railroad Blues." Other important Paley performances with the NLCR include "Sales Tax on the Women," "Baltimore Fire," and many more.After the breakup of the original band, he formed the OLD RELIABLE STRING BAND (w/ Roy Berkeley and Artie Rose.) The NLCR continued on with Tracy Swartz replacing Paley. Tom moved to Sweden, where he lived for three years, from 1963 until 1965, before moving to England, where he has resided ever since. He continues to tour in America and various parts of Europe. He performs solo and with other musicians. Tom recorded a well-respected album with James Reams and Bill Christophersen -- called The Mysterious Redbirds, 1992-1998 -- which was recorded during three of his trips back to the United States.While in England, he worked with Joe Locker and other fiddlers as the NEW DEAL STRING BAND. The NDSB was put on hiatus in the late 70's, but has been revived in recent years with Tom's son, Ben, as the main fiddler. In 1975, Tom took up the fiddle, as well, and the NDSB continues with two fiddlers. He has become quite proficient on the instrument, and has even been awarded the Swedish Zorn-medal for his Swedish fiddle playing.Tom recorded a well-respected album with James Reams and Bill Christophersen -- called The Mysterious Redbirds, 1992-1998 -- which was recorded during three of his trips back to the United States.Tom was made President of the UK society FOAOTMAD (Friends of American Old-Time Music and Dance) at its formation in 1993, and often performs at its annual festival.

from a 3/1/70 PARADE Magazine from the Sunday Oregonian newspaper. from the nytimes, July 7, 1993

David Paley, a Retired Editor, Dies at 90David Paley, a retired senior editor of Parade magazine and associate arts editor at The New York Herald Tribune, died on Sunday at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale. He was 90 and a resident of Manhattan before moving to Riverdale in the Bronx several months ago.His daughter, Maggie, said he died of cardiorespiratory failure.Mr. Paley began his newspaper career as a copy editor for The Knickerbocker News in Albany in the early 1940's. A few years later, he joined The Herald Tribune as a copy editor and in 1960 he became co-editor of the newly founded Lively Arts section, a position he held until The Tribune folded in 1966. After an editorial stint with The World Journal Tribune, he became senior editor at Parade in 1967. After retiring in 1978, he did freelance editing.He was born near Minsk, Russia, and was under a year old when his family immigrated to New York City. When his father, a painter, fell ill, the young Paley dropped out of high school and worked as an accounts-receivable clerk for the Standard Oil Company before going into journalism.Besides his daughter, Maggie, an author and book critic who lives in Manhattan, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Sylvia Leichtling; a son, Tom, a traditional folk musician in London; a brother, Abe, and a sister, Lee Handleman, both of Nutley, N.J.; a grandson and a great-grandson.

a h/t to Mark and his wife Jane for sending me this 2005 article from Family/O Magazine. It's by Maggie Paley and I think it touches on many similar feelings we all share about KV. I researched her and found the pic of her above and two books she has written. Stop your laughing you immature clowns. The article mentioned she lived there in the 40's and 50's. More to come on the Paleys

Monday, July 28, 2008

A recent discussion with a KV brother: he preferred Bennett to Sinatra. I disagreed on talent, but I had to agree on character. A born and raised New Yorker, from Astoria, who was schooled in Manhattan. By all accounts a real mensch. Nice song choice here too. Check out part of his wikipedia bio:

Tony Bennett (born Anthony Dominick Benedetto; August 3, 1926) is an American singer of popular music, standards and jazz. After having achieved artistic and commercial success in the 1950s and early 1960s, his career suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era. Bennett staged a comeback, however, in the late 1980s and 1990s, expanding his audience to a younger generation while keeping his musical style intact. He remains a popular and critically praised recording artist and concert performer in the 2000s.Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter.Anthony Benedetto was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City, the son of Ann (née Suraci) and John Benedetto. His father was a grocer who had emigrated from Podàrgoni, a rural eastern district of the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria, and his mother was a seamstress. With two other children and a father who was ailing and unable to work, the family grew up in poverty.John Benedetto died when Anthony was 10 years old.The young Benedetto grew up listening to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland and Bing Crosby as well as jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and Joe Venuti. An uncle was a tap dancer in vaudeville, giving him an early window into show business. By age 10 he was already singing and performed at the opening of the Triborough Bridge. Drawing and caricatures were also an early passion of his. He attended New York's High School of Industrial Art where he studied painting and music, but dropped out at age 16 to help support his family. He then set his sights on a professional singing career, performing as a singing waiter in several Queens Italian restaurants.His singing career was interrupted when Benedetto was drafted into the United States Army in November 1944 during the final stages of World War II. He did basic training at Fort Dix and Fort Robinson, encountering bigotry due to his Italian heritage, and became an infantry rifleman. Processed through the huge Le Havre "repple depple" replacement depot, in January 1945 he was assigned as a replacement infantryman to 255th Infantry Regiment of the 63rd Infantry Division, a unit filling in for heavy losses after the Battle of the Buldge. He moved across France and into Germany,and as March 1945 began he joined the front line and what he would later describe as a "front-row seat in hell."As the German Army was pushed back into their homeland, Benedetto and his company saw bitter fighting in cold winter conditions, often hunkering down in foxholes as German 88 mm guns fired on them. At the end of March they crossed the Rhine and engaged in dangerous house-to-house, town-to-town fighting to clean out German soldiers; during the first week of April they crossed the Kocher and by the end of the month reached the Danube.During his time in combat, Benedetto narrowly escaped death several times.The experience made him a patriot but also a pacifist; he would later write, "Anybody who thinks that war is romantic obviously hasn't gone through one."At the war's conclusion he was involved in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp near Landsberg, where some American prisoners of war from the 63rd Division were also freed.Benedetto stayed in Germany as part of the occupying force, but was assigned to an informal Special Services band unit that would entertain nearby American forces.Later, his dining with a black friend from high school at a time when the Army was still segregated led to his being demoted and reassigned to Graves Registration duties. Subsequently, he sang with the Army military band under the stage name Joe Bari, and played with many musicians who would have post-war careers.

Ok, this guy's accomplishments more than counters the guy in witness protection (h/t to Mike Meeropol for this info)

Martin Lawrence "Marty" Weitzman is a well known-economist and a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is among the 200 best economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. His current research is focused on environmental economics, specifically climate change and the economics of catastrophes. Aside from his role as a Professor, he also serves as a consultant to many organizations and is the Associate editor of multiple journals.He was born on April 1, 1942 in New York City, NY. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Swarthmore College in 1963. He went on to receive an M.S. in Statistics and Operations Research from Stanford University in 1964, and then attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a Ph.D. in Economics in 1967.\Weitzman's research has covered a wide range of topics including Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Green Accounting, Economics of Biodiversity, Economics of Environmental Regulation, Economics of Climate Change, Discounting, Comparative Economic Systems, Economics of Profit Sharing, Economic Planning, and Microfoundations of Macro Theory.Much of Weitzman's current research is focused on climate change. Traditional cost-benefit analysis of climate change looks at the costs of reducing global warming (the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions) versus the benefits (potentially stopping or slowing climate change). However, in most analysises, the damages that would stem from dramatic climate change are not taken into consideration. Weitzman has added dramatic climate change to the cost-benefit analysis to show that immediate measures must be taken in regards to climate change regulation.Weitzman's past research was focused on fixed versus profit sharing wages and their effect on unemployment. He proposed that when firms use profit sharing wages, meaning employees receive higher wages when a company is doing well, firms have lower rates of unemployment and do better during recessions.Another topic of research that Weitzman is well known for is his study of price versus quantity controls. Weitzman proposed a theory that when faced with uncertainty the relative slopes of the marginal benefits versus the marginal costs must be examined in order to determine which type of control will be most effective. For example, in the case of pollution, the relative slopes of marginal costs and marginal damages must be examined. His research showed that if the slope of marginal costs is steeper, price controls are more effective and if the relative slope of marginal damages is steeper, then quantity controls are more effective.Weitzman has written two books: The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation and Income, Wealth, and the Maximum Principal. In The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation, Weitzman proposes that a main cause of Stagflation is paying workers a fixed wage, regardless of how the company is performing. He introduces an alternate labor payment system as a way of combating stagflation. Income, Wealth, and the Maximum Principal is a book geared towards advanced economic students particularly those who want to be able to formulate and solve complex allocation problems and who are interested in the relationship between income accounting and wealth or welfare.Weitzman began his teaching career in 1967 as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University. Three years later Martin was promoted to be an Associate Professor and he remained in this position until 1972; at this time he joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972 still as an Associate Professor. In 1974, Weitzman became a Professor at MIT, where he taught until 1989. From 1986- 1989, Weitzman was recognized as a Mitsui Professor at MIT. In 1989, Martin Weitzman became an Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Economics at Harvard University and has remained in this position for the last 18 years. He currently teaches two graduate courses: Ec 2680 Environmental and Natural Resource Economics & Ec 2690 Environmental Economics and Policy Seminar.\Martin Weitzman serves as a consultant to The World Bank, Stanford Research Institute, International Monetary Fund, Agency for International Development, Arthur D. Little Co., Canadian Parliamentary Committee on Employment, Icelandic Committee on Natural Resources, National Academy Panel on Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting.He also serves as Associate Editor of the following publications: Journal of Comparative Economics, Economic Letters, Journal of Japanese and International Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management * National Science Foundation Fellow, 1963-65 * Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1963-64 * Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, 1966 * Guggenheim Fellow, 1970-71 * Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1976-present * Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986-present * Association of Environmental and Resource Economists: Special Award for “Publicationof Enduring Quality.” * Keynote Speaker, 2002 World Congress of Environmental Economists * Keynote Speaker, 2006 World Congress of Animal Geneticists

From wikipedia and quite a story. Go know that a KVer is in the witness protection program?

Richard Cantarella aka “Shellackhead”(b. 1944) was an New York mobster who became a caporegime for the Bonanno crime family and later a government witness. Cantarella was born on the Lower East Side, Manhattan and raised in Knickerbocker Village, a public housing development that was home to many Bonanno family members. A skinny kid with jet-black hair, Cantarella got the name "Shellackhead" from the hair oil that he used. In 1963, Cantarella started working at the nearby New York Post distribution center as a delivery truck driver. The Bonanno family controlled the distribution center through a local union of newspaper workers. Cantarella and his cousin, Bonanno mobster Joseph D'Amico, would serve as “hired muscle” on the newspaper's loading docks for over thirty years. Starting in 1988 and lasting until 1991, Cantarella became a so-called “tail man”, a worker who rides on the back of the delivery truck and unloads the newspaper bundles. However, Cantarella paid a laborer $20 a night to do the work while he collected his $700 a week in wages.Cantarella is cousin to Frank Cantarella and Bonnano soldier Anthony Mirra and uncle to Bonanno soldier Joseph Padovano. Cantarella's uncle is Bonanno capo Alfred Embarrato. Cantarella is married to Lauretta Castelli and is the father of Bonanno crime family mobster Paul Cantarella and daughter Tracey.During the late 70's, Cantarella became friends with Manhattan City councilman Richard Mazzeo, the Director of Real Estate for the City of New York's Marine and Aviation Department. Mazzeo controlled the dispensing of leases for newsstands and parking lots at the terminals for the Staten Island Ferry, which commutes between Manhattan and Staten Island in New York Harbor. In return for granting leases, Mazzeo received large kickbacks from the leasees. Cantarella had told Mazzeo that a newspaper vendor at the Lower Manhattan terminal was operating an illegal sportsbook operation. This information allowed Mazzeo to break the vendor's lease and evict him. In return, Mazzeo installed Cantarella as the vendor's replacment. By the 1980s, Cantarella controlled newspaper stands on both Staten Island and Manhattan. Cantarella and Mazzeo became close friends and briefly shared an apartment in Upper Manhattan. The two men made hundreds of thousands of dollars on their lease scams.However, things changed in 1983. Mazzeo lost his job, was convicted of tax charges, and spent six months in jail. Mazzeo started using illegal drugs and Cantarella started worrying that Mazzeo might become a government witness. After consulting with other Bonanno members, Cantarella decided to murder Mazzeo. On the evening of Nov. 14, 1983, Cantarella, Embarrato, D'Amico, and Patrick Romanello met Mazzeo at a sanitation garage in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Mazzeo was meeting them at the upstairs garage office to see about getting a job. As the men walked down the stairs, Cantarella shot Mazzeo in the head. After shooting and stabbing the body several times, they loaded it into a black plastic bag and dumped it. The body was discovered five days later.In 1982, the Bonanno family was rocked by the revelation that one of their associates for several years, Donnie Brasco, was actually a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undercover agent named Joseph Pistone. Cantarella's cousin Mirra was among those responsible for introducing Brasco into the family. After the family executed capo Dominick Napolitano, another Brasco friend, the terrified Mirra went into hiding. Family boss Joseph Massino ordered Cantarella to murder Mirra. On February 18, 1982 Cantarella convinced Mirra to meet him at a parking garage in Lower Manhattan. As Cantarella and uncle Alfred Embarrato kept watch, D'Amico climbed into Mirra's silver Volvo and shot him in the temple at point blank Beginning in 1991, Cantarella started using his son as an accomplice in many of his criminal operations. In 1994, Cantarella and other mobsters kidnapped a wealthy businessman at his office, drove him home, forced him to deactivate the burglar alarm system, and robbed him of cash, jewelry and other valuables. As part of the plan, they forced the victim to start paying protection money to Cantarella. Cantarella also extorted $250,000 from another businessman, using part of the stolen proceeds to purchase a 1962 Pontiac convertible automobile for his wife.In 1992, the State of New York started investigating allegations of racketeering and fraud at the New York Post. The target was the Bonanno family and its control of the newspaper. During the investigation, the family became concerned that Robert Perrino, a delivery superintendent at the paper, would cooperate with prosecutors. Perrino had been operating a number of criminal scams at the Post, victimizing both fellow employees and the company. Perrino's main contact with the Bonanno family was Salvatore VitaleVitale approached Canterella and asked him if he would murder Perrino. Vitale suggested to Cantarella that he could take Perrino's job at the Post. Cantarella, a lifelong friend to Perrino, raised no objections. Vitale then told Bonanno consigliere Anthony Spero that Cantarella wanted to eliminate Perrino. Spero gave Cantarella permission and the following week Perrino disappeared. In December 2003, Perrino's skeleton was excavated from the floor of a construction company in Staten Island. Perrino had been shot multiple times to the head.With the imprisonment of Vitale in the early part of this decade, Cantarella became acting underboss for the family. However, in October 2002, Cantarella was himself indicted on racketeering charges that included the Perrino murder, arson, kidnapping, loansharking, extortion, illegal gambling, and money laundering. In December 2002, Perrino accepted a deal to avoid prison time and became a government witness along with his son Paul and his wife. In early 2003, the Bonanno family realized that Cantarella had become an informant.In June 2004, Cantarella testified at the murder trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, admitting in court his own role in the 1983 Mazzeo killing. In July 2007, Cantarella testified at the murder and racketeering trial of Bonanno mobster Vincent Basciano. As of 2008, it is assumed that Canterella and his family are part of a Witness Protection Program.

The Nathanson's came from East New York. This is from 1942, Moe and Phyllis wouldn't arrive until the late 40's. Interesting because Morris Karney's address in 1942 (199 Powell Street) was less than a mile away.

The "old man draft" of 1942 has enabled me to use a back door to figure out the pre-KV addresses of some of our parents and grandparents. Currently the 1930 census is the latest one available to the public and often there are numerous spelling errors. The Karney case is even more difficult because of a name change that took place at some point and no one knows what it was changed from. The story that was shared with me was that building trade jobs that Morris sought were often denied due to anti-semitism. This bears out as Morris lists his vocation in construction. Interesting is a possible work location in Baltimore.

I know, this is a real stretch, but I wanted to show off my original lyric, adapted from the LES all star Yip Harburg. As for Sarkozy (read about his roots here) , he's a one half Greek Sephardic Jew, just like the webmaster. I just wish I had his kavorka with womenaudio by the Singers' Unlimited

Obama in Paris, groupies in blossomAll of France buckle their kneesObama in Paris, this is a feelingNo one can ever repriseThey never knew the charm of Barack They never met him face to face So easily were their hearts hijacked John should just concede the raceTill Obama in Paris,Sarkozy be careful tooWhat has he done to.. Carla's heart ?

It could have been a French movie.Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.Sarko is right and Barack is left. One had a Jewish grandfather, the other a Muslim one. The French president is a frenetic bumper car; the Illinois senator is, as he said of the king of Jordan’s Mercedes 600, “a smooth ride.”But the son of a Hungarian, who picked a lock to break into the French ruling class, embraced a fellow outsider and child of an immigrant who had also busted into the political aristocracy with a foreign-sounding name.After 200,000 people thronged to see Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin, christening him “Redeemer” and “Savior,” it turned out Sarko was also Obamarized, as the Germans were calling the mesmerizing effect.“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”How do you go back to the Iowa farm after you’ve seen Paree?“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg.”He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations liking the American president, because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as “The One”?“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp.A private prayer he left in the holy Western Wall in Jerusalem was snatched out by a student at a Jewish seminary and published in a local newspaper. In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”I ask him if he found it a bit creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like “fabric softener with spring scent.”He looked nonplused: “Did she describe what my T-shirt smelled like?”Being a Citizen of the World has its downsides.

I guess that's a donkey's head on top of 49 (local dem headquarters) and not a horse'sI never knew that Duke's name was Prospero? No wonder he went for the nickname. If you read between the lines on the 1947 article it looks like the Tammany pols were abandoning one crook, due to Loughlin's association to Frank Costello, for another.

Part of the South Street Seaport Basketball League. Well played, well coached, well officiated. I told one of the coaches that almost 50 years ago Cal Ramsey pounded these same courts. He was impressed.

Ashcan Views of New Yorkers, Warts, High Spirits and AllBy KEN JOHNSON December 28, 2007The painters of the Ashcan School just wanted to have fun. They chronicled the lives of poor city dwellers, but they were neither social critics nor reformers. Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan and other early-20th-century American realists identified with the group were high-spirited fellows who prided themselves on fielding a baseball team that regularly defeated those of the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. They liked to dine in fancy restaurants and hang out at McSorley’s, the men’s-only tavern on East Seventh Street. They enjoyed the theater, the circus and trips to Coney Island. No Puritan crusaders, they were manly epicureans, and their virile hero was Teddy Roosevelt.Such is the view propounded by “Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush With Leisure” at the New-York Historical Society. Organized by James W. Tottis, associate curator of American art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the exhibition presents more than 80 paintings by 22 artists dating from 1895 to 1925 that focus on scenes of recreation: bars and restaurants, sporting events, carnivals, parks and beaches.The exhibition will not prompt any great re-evaluation of the Ashcan School. Its painters were not of world-class spiritual depth or formal imagination. But they were a lively bunch of provincial rebels who created America’s first true avant-garde, and their chapter in the book of art history is still fascinating.The show also commemorates the forthcoming centenary of the exhibition that put the Ashcan School on the map: the 1908 show at MacBeth Gallery in New York called “The Eight,” which included Henri, Luks and Sloan, as well as William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Everett Shinn. Henri organized the show to protest the rejection of himself and his friends from the National Academy of Design’s spring exhibition the previous year.It was not until much later, however, that the Ashcan School got its name. In 1916 a staff member of the socialist magazine The Masses objected to the insufficiently high-minded “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street” by Sloan, George Bellows and others of the Henri circle that illustrated the magazine.Elevated or not, the Ashcan painters were drawn to what they saw as the vitality of the lower classes. Bellows’s 1907 painting “Forty-two Kids,” in which a gang of mostly naked boys swims off a decaying Hudson River pier, is not an indictment of poverty but an anti-academic celebration of unsupervised freedom, spontaneity and play.Favoring a brushy, gestural application inspired by the paintings of Hals, Velázquez and Manet, the Ashcan artists were action painters who mirrored the flux of reality with the flux of their brushwork, and, sometimes, by intensifying light and color. See, for example, Shinn’s extraordinarily luminous paintings of theatrical productions.Many of the Ashcan painters were well prepared for this approach, having started out as newspaper illustrators. Being able to draw on the run, however, did not necessarily translate into very good painting. Ashcan paintings often look muddy and too hastily made.Judging by an exhibition of his etchings at the Museum of the City of New York, Sloan, for one, was a better draftsman than painter. Most of the 34 prints in “John Sloan’s New York” are not much bigger than postcards, but teeming as they are with affectionate, finely detailed observations of old, young, poor and rich on sidewalks, in parks and on subways, they have a Dickensian amplitude.This being America at the turn of the 20th century, sexuality tends to be muted, but it’s not totally repressed. One of Sloan’s most delightful prints shows a young woman descending subway stairs: Her skirt has flipped up in a sudden gust, giving a man going up the stairs a leggy eyeful. And back at the Ashcan show, there’s Henri’s bigger-than-life painting of a voluptuous model posing as a smirking Salome in a sparkly halter top, with bared midriff and sheer fabric revealing her naked legs; it was shocking enough in 1910 to be rejected from the National Academy’s spring annual.Glackens’s sumptuous, Impressionist-style masterpiece, “Chez Mouquin,” intimates a socio-sexual complexity that is mostly missing from the rest of the show. The image of a beautiful, extravagantly dressed, sad-eyed young woman sitting in a restaurant with a beefy, prosperous-looking man in a tuxedo is like a scene from Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth,” which, as it happens, was published in 1905, the same year as the painting was made. Alternatively, Guy Pène du Bois’s haunting, smoothly simplified, slyly satiric pictures of upper-class people in empty rooms could illustrate novels by Henry James.In 1913 disaster struck the Ashcan School in the form of the Armory Show, which, by introducing European avant-gardists like Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp to America, caused the near-total eclipse of native realism.If Ashcan painting looks like a dead end today, we should not forget that it gave birth to two indisputably great American painters: Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis. It might also be said that the Ashcan spirit returned in Abstract Expressionism, a movement that favored visceral action over aesthetic refinement. Willem de Kooning’s famous line — “I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity” — could have been the Ashcan motto.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

In this film we follow a prim young woman in white gloves as she explores Greenwich Village on a Sunday afternoon. She walks off the Fifth Avenue bus at Washington Square and straight into a "hootenanny." This is a corny, but charming look at the Village in the early sixties in the transitional period between the "beat' generation and the rise of the later sixties counter-culture. The best scenes are when we actually hear the folksingers singing bluegrass tunes around the Washington Square fountain and the beat poet reading in a grubby coffeehouse. These scenes have real documentary value. The film's use of actors to try to create a story gives it an amateurish feeling, but that same amateurism is what also gives the film its charm. It was nice to see the old Italian Greenwich Village with the street market and the stickball and bocce players, who are now long gone. The Greenwich Village portrayed here looks like a shabby, tolerant place where ordinary people could afford to live. Alas, that is no more.This laid-back early-60s film shows us street life in Greenwich Village on a Sunday. We see such things as sidewalk art displays, folksinging in the circle, and beatniks reciting poetry. This definitely brings back a memorable time and place, giving us a glimpse of the birth of the 60s counterculture. One rather silly aspect of the film is a prim woman in a striped dress and little white gloves who appears in almost every scene and reacts to things as if she was on Mars (though with a smile on her face). This film could have perhaps had more content to it, but then it wouldn't have been as laid back as a Greenwich Village Sunday.I was excited when I read that the great Jean Shepherd was the narrator. He was among the hippest men in America in 1960. However in this film all he does is read the rather square travelogue type script and that's disappointing. However I really enjoyed the scenes shot in Washington Square Park where the folkies hung out singing their silly songs. The beat poet Ted Joans was kind of cool too.An interesting overview of 1960's New York (more specifically Greenwich Village). This film has the mood down pat, with the banjos, bongos and the hip language of the period. It takes us on a tour of everyday practices then (oh, maybe it hasn't changed) taking us through art exhibitions on the street, men playing bocce (sigh) and other sights. Although pretty much filled with interesting locals, I REALLY with they didn't include the obviously eyesore actors, who stick out like a sore thumb. But other then that, a highly enjoyable film!

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, William Glackens, 1870-1938, became a part of the Realist painters following Robert Henri, but much of his work avoids the seamier side of society and shows bustling middle class activity. He also adopted Impressionism and did many paintings of seaside resorts on Cape Cod and Long Island, particularly Bellport where he and his family spent summers.He graduated from Philadelphia's Central High School with John Sloan and in 1891 became an artist-reporter for the 'Philadelphia Record.' He did the same kind of work from 1892 to 1895 for the 'Philadelphia Press' with John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. He studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy with Thomas Anshutz and then shared a studio and traveled in Europe with Robert Henri. There he painted many scenes of life in He settled in New York, worked as an illustrator, and was part of 'The Eight,' a landmark exhibition of urban realists at the Macbeth Galleries. Early in his painting career, he painted numerous scenes of Washington Square and Central Park but then turned to beach scenes.

song by Jerome Kern, sung by Johnny Hartman

Long ago and far away, I dreamed a dream one dayAnd now that dream is here beside meLong the skies were overcast but now the clouds have passedYou're here at lastChills run up and down my spine, Aladdin's lamp is mineThe dream I dreamed was not denied meJust one look and then I knewThat all I longed for long ago was youChills run up and down my spine, Aladdin's lamp is mineThe dream I dreamed was not denied meJust one look and then I knewThat all I longed for long ago was you

John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 - September 8, 1951) was a U.S. artist. He was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania., to a businessman father and a schoolteacher mother. At the age of 20, he became an illustrator with The Philadelphia Inquirer. He studied art in the evening at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he met his mentor, Robert Henri, author of "The Art Spirit." Sloan's style was heavily influenced by European artists of the late 19th and early 20th century. He was familiar with Van Gogh's work, as well as Picasso, and Matisse, and several of his works appear as if they are a fusion of European styles.Sloan moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where he painted some of his best-known works, including McSorley's Bar, Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street and Wake of the Ferry. In later years, he spent summers working and painting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.He was allied with the Ashcan School and a member of The Eight, a group of American realist artists that included Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks, and William J. Glackens. One of his students was Norman Raeben.“The fun of being a New York painter, says Sloan, even today, is that landmarks are torn down so rapidly that your canvases become historical records almost before the paint on them is dry.” Esquire, 1936When John and Dolly Sloan arrived in New York in 1904, they were two of approximately 100,000 people moving to the city that year. The Sloans settled in Chelsea, one of the city’s commercial centers, where shops, moving picture parlors, and entertainment halls of every sort clustered around Sixth Avenue. Sloan’s apartment at 165 West 23rd Street (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues) bordered on the Tenderloin, a district famous for its nightclubs and bordellos. His living room window looked out on what he termed “the busy throng on 23rd Street.” This throng and their activities—walking to the theaters, window shopping and, above all else, watching each other—would become the subject of Sloan’s prints and paintings. The landmarks in Sloan’s early New York paintings are the elevated train tracks, streets, shops, and dive bars of his neighborhood, rather than the city’s tourist sites.Sloan’s student, Guy Pène du Bois, described him eloquently as “the historian of Sixth Avenue, Fourteenth Street, Union Square, Madison Square.”Madison Square Park, located just a few blocks from his home, was one of Sloan’s favorite sites during his years in Chelsea. In Sloan’s New York, the parks, like the streets, were places where diverse individuals encountered each other every day. The city allowed male and female, old and young, affluent and impoverished, to observe and comment on each other, a pleasure which Sloan indulged in his art.In 1912 Sloan moved first his studio and then his apartment down Sixth Avenue to Greenwich Village. In moving to the Village, Sloan left a commercial center in Chelsea for the heart of the city’s liberal, intellectual community, subtly shifting his alliance from the workaday world of Chelsea and the Tenderloin to the city’s most bohemian and artistic quarter. The Village was fast becoming a haven for creative types, and in the popular imagination, it represented a place outside the bounds of middle-class social norms. Emblematic of this was the neighborhood’s physical fabric, much noted in Sloan’s day. With its meandering streets, where 4th Street crosses 10th Street, Greenwich Village was literally outside the grid of New York City, a characteristic celebrated by its creative residents. The anarchist Hippolyte Havel stated that the Village had no geographical boundaries; it was “a spiritual zone of mind.” Filled with artists, writers, and political radicals, Greenwich Village appeared to exist apart from the bustling capitalist center that was Manhattan.Sloan found a community in the Village, and many of his paintings and etchings document that community’s leaders—Romany Marie Marchand, Juliana Force, Hippolyte Havel, Eugene O’Neill—and landmarks—Jefferson Market, Washington Square, McSorley’s Bar, the Lafayette, and the Golden Swan.Sloan remained in the Village for more than two decades, becoming, by the 1920s, one of the neighborhood’s artistic features, mentioned in guidebooks. He stayed to see the Village overrun by tourists and, in the 1920s, by speakeasies known as “tea rooms.” He saw Seventh Avenue extended and the subway run through the Village, and in 1927 the Sloans were forced to vacate their apartment on Washington Place because it was being demolished as part of subway construction and the extension of Sixth Avenue southward. They settled on Washington Square South, and Sloan’s relocation inspired a spate of photographs of Sixth Avenue, the Square and of One Fifth Avenue, an art deco skyscraper under construction just above the north end of the park. A tower of luxury apartments, One Fifth Avenue was a sign of gentrification to come. When New York University took over the building housing Sloan’s apartment on Washington Square in 1935, the Sloans were unable to find affordable accommodations in the Village. They returned to Chelsea. For the rest of his life, Sloan kept an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, only blocks from his first home in New York City.

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Knickerbocker Village at the 2010 Conference on New York State History, June 4

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June 1974

PS 177: June, 1959, Nancy with Mrs. Jonas

About Knickerbocker Village

I found that a recurring topic on my blog, Pseudo Intellectualism, would be my memories of the wonderful place I grew up in on the Lower East Side, Knickerbocker Village. I lived there from 1952-1964. There has also been an avalanche of new information coming in from my old friends through our group emails. All of this has refreshed our collective minds and I decided to shift my old posts (from the last two years) to this dedicated site as well as add new recollections. Hopefully other lost KVer's can arrive here and feel free to share as well. Note 1: Many posts are an outgrowth of history projects I did with kids while teaching on the LES. Note 2: As this blog has evolved it has also become a view of life in NYC during the 50's and 60's.You can contact me atdavidbellel.mac.com.

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Deep Thoughts

#1. Annie Dillard talks about her fascination with science and minerals in particular. Then she goes on to details anecdotes concerning various Americans who became obsessed with the possibility of discovering valuable or interesting mineral deposits or rock formations within or close to their home environments. She speaks about men - almost all these scientific minded people are male - who discover veins of coal, copper, bauxite, and so on. She depicts the ordinariness of their fascination and the fact that it tapped into the extraordinary. Like nature had these incredible finds waiting to be unearthed all around. People who could see the worth of what was all around them or, in some cases, beneath them, excavated and found, just beneath the surface of their obsessive preoccupations, depths of riches and fascination. So in exploring the history of KV we go back into what had been the ordinary and find it layered in a criss-cross of historical significance. A transmutation of the lung block, redeemed as a bold social experiment tinged with ambitions as immodest as a revolution and as commonplace as sandwiches - ordinary though it may be but still - the most delicious sandwiches of the twentieth century. Buried beneath the surface of the KV heritage are connections to so may aspects of our culture and NYC's greatness as to be not only unfathomable but irrefutable. Do you know what I'm saying here?

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To be is to do - PlatoTo do is to be - SocratesDo be do be do - Frank Sinatra

"Speak, KV Memory" by Vladimir Babokov and Guests

Yes. I was thrown out of the Canal theater a number of Saturdays for rolling on the floor, in the aisles laughing. I think one of the movies that prompted my gaiety was "Psycho" - the shower scene. What can I tell you? I guess I wasn't tuned into the mood. At the time. Also saw many rock and roll movies at the Canal, Elvis films and the Murray the K fests. Saturday I often would go there with Joey Maldonado and his cousins. We would load up on candy by the quarter pound from that obscure bakery that was just around the corner on Madison Street, quarter block from Catherine - around the corner from the Brokowsky's fruit store, Gogol's and the pharmacy on the corner. Next to the newstand. Remember? By the bus stop. See what I'm saying? (In your mind, can you see it?) Bakery had golden and tan tile design but couldn't hold a candle to Savoia. No marble floors either.

guest memorist Howie:the first movie I ever went to was at the Tribune Theatre (near City Hall, now by the site of Pace University), a Disney cartoon 'Lady and the Tramp', also remember going there with Ronnie, David and maybe Paul, think it was '62 to see 'Safe at Home' starring Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris....I saw 'The Time Machine" with David at the Canal theatre in 1960 (academy award to George Pal - special effects), we were so taken by the notion of time travel that we proceeded to go home and build a time machine...somehow we got hold of some wood, nails, rope and wheels..after a couple of days the time machine started to take shape although it looked remarkably like a pretty decent scooter so we decided it needed a safe haven and hid it in a pit on Monroe St...one that we were able to climb...on the third day the time machine was stolen from the pit...we never saw it again...probably in the year 3000 by now..

guest memorist Neal Hellman on BLT's (the non Ref Luncheonette variety)A great B.L.T. is a complex eatable symphony. One in which all the parts maintain their individuality, yet at the same time, surrender their tasty nuances in the true spirit of gastronomic gestalt and dwell as one.This equinox I choose Sumano's Bakery Ciabatta bread. Though I was skeptical about it's naked, pale texture, I felt it would toast up well and its many crevices would add some fun places for the mayo to go.With the mayonnaise choice I have to stay with tradition and of course go with Hellmann's though for some reason it's known west of the Mississippi as “best foods”. Please do not waste my time with this hippie safflower oil concoction or some other type of healthy alternative. For when it comes to mayonnaise for my Ultimate B.L.T. there is no east or west, there is only Hellmann's…. case closed.My ingredients are now all together, but the intense work has just begun. For now without the correct timing and the correct application of all the ingredients, my ritual could easily plummet into a spiritual abyss. All ingredients must sit together (as one) at room temperature as I invoke the spirit of all the great B.L.T. makers in all the luncheonettes in the greater metropolitan area of New York. I heat my cast iron skillet (using a Teflon pan would be heresy) to a comfortable medium heat. I lay the bacon down 4 strips per sandwich and as I do the strips greet the metal with a friendly sizzle “hello”. As they are slowly cooking I cut the tomato's, neither too thin or too thick and lay them down ever so gently on a plate to await their glorious marriage. The lettuce has been carefully washed and spun with all traces of ribs removed. The mayonnaise jar is open and waiting to join this eatable canvass.Once the bacon is turned the toast swings into action. It has to be brown all the way but with no traces of crusty darkness.As the toast is finishing I remove the bacon and pat it down with a paper towel. Now it's time to assemble my edible equinox creation. Mayo on both pieces of toast, then the tomato's and I prefer the lettuce between the tomato and the bacon, for I feel it's texturally more secure that way. I don't want an immediate confluence of tomato and bacon; I like the lettuce to work as a buffer. Here's where many folks really go askew: they push the bread down so hard that the bacon is crushed. No, no a thousand times no. One must gently, ever so gently caress the concoction together. After which one will take a sharp knife and make a diagonal cut. A straight cut is what people from small towns in Nebraska and Ohio do. Those of use who are members of the B.L.T. illuminati always make a diagonal cut. The masterpiece will then be placed on a plate and then consumed in a way as to enjoy the warm and crunchy (yet still pliable) bacon, the exploding sensation of a dry farm Molino tomato, the juicy lettuce, the condiment-ing mayonnaise and ever so supportive bread. My first Ultimate B.L.T. goes to my neighbor for her birthday. With that offering I realize now that I am truly invoking the Japanese Equinox celebration of Hign-e. Yes with my ultimate B.L.T. offering I am illustrating the six perfections: perseverance, effort, meditation, wisdom, observance of precepts, and giving.

KV Journeyman

11/13/07: Even standing in the cold rain, the Baroque facades on these buildings are fantastic. Brussels has some of the best architecture in the world, all types, all styles. Standing in the middle of the main town square one is overwhelmed with the magnitude of detail and size.

11/14/07: I am currently in Brugge in NW Belgium. It appears to be a quiet town with all old and small buildings, perhaps pre-Victorian, with a network of canals similar, but without the gondolas and singing rip-off-the-tourist gondoleers. I'll learn more tomorrow as we get a tour prior to dinner.

12/5/07: Just finished a fresh grilled tilapia sandwich while sitting outside looking at the expansive white sands of Clearwater Beach and the far reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, realizing I am flying back to DC tomorrow morning into the remnants of the latest Alberta Clipper to wreak havoc on the Nation's Capitol. Enough to upset the strongest and staunchest among us.

Time Magazine: 10/15/1934

Smack in the middle of the slum-mulligan of Manhattan's lower East Side two barefaced, rectangular apartments rear their bricks twelve stories into the air. Jointly christened Knickerbocker Village, they cover four whole city blocks. Between the two units is a concrete playground, and within each will be a garden. Each of the 1,593 apartments has wooden parquet floors, electric refrigeration, tiled bathrooms, outside windows. The elevators are self-operating. Rentals range from $22.50 for 2½ rooms on the ground floor to $87.50 for a 5½-room penthouse. Average is $12.50 a room. Knickerbocker Village will cost about $9,000,000, and with the exception of Rockefeller Center is the only large structure which Manhattanites have noticed abuilding these last two years. Last week it was ready for occupancy.

Because Knickerbocker Village is also Manhattan's first experiment in government-financed, low-cost housing, RFC's Chairman Jesse H. Jones, East-Sider Alfred E. Smith, many a minor wig gathered in its banner-decked playground to mark the day. Said Al Smith: "I was tempted to swap the Empire State Building." Chairman Jones thumped the tub of slum clearance. Informed that the first of the two units was already 95% rented, while the second unit (to be opened Dec. 1) was 50% rented, he waved an expansive hand at the holiday bunting, declared: "I know of no ... safer investment for public funds than to clear about 500 acres of your slums."*

Whether or not Knickerbocker Village was a fitting inspiration for such official rejoicing was last week a red hot sociological question.

In 1929 Realtor Fred Fillmore French began buying land on the lower East Side. By swearing his 42 brokers to secrecy and using dummy corporations, he managed to get some 15 acres for $5,000,000. Then in 1931 he announced a grandiose scheme for the erection of a $50,000,000 development for junior Wall Street executives. At this point he found that he could not get credit. At the same time Fred F. French Operators, Inc. began passing its dividends on $14,000,000 of preferred stock. The project remained only a scheme with a staggering upkeep in land taxes.

When Congress authorized the RFC to make loans on slum clearance projects, Realtor French picked out the worst block in his holdings and ecstatically presented it to Mr. Jones as a worthy subject for clearance. His choice was "Lung Block," so called because of its high tuberculosis mortality rate. On it lived 650 families. In its backyards were seven jakes. On this fester Mr. French proposed to build a low-cost housing project. Mr. Jones agreed to do business, and RFC lent 85% of the required $9,000.000.

Average cost of "Lung Block" to Knickerbocker Village was high: $3,116,000, or $14 per square foot. The tax assessment was therefore reduced by two-thirds to bring the monthly room rental down to the $12.50 stipulated by the RFC. Because the average rental on "Lung Block" had been about $5 a room, Knickerbocker Village remained a low-cost housing project only in the minds of the white collar workers, who proceeded to fill it.